I met with Chris Yeh the PBWorks VP of Marketing the other day, and he told me that they moved from PBWiki (which I had used many years ago) to the PBWorks name back in May of this year, and that people had created 1M workspaces since then. PBWorks gets 3M unique visitors each month, the majority of them using the free version of this service. They have about 700,000 paid seats right now, from about 5,000 paying customers, which is about a 2% (free to paid) conversion rate. This is pretty normal for a collaboration tool, in that most othercollaboration vendors I have asked about this are in the 3-4% conversion rate. To be fair PBWorks does convert 6% of its 30-day trials to paid customers which is pretty good. PBWorks is about 30 people (half of them developers), and headquartered in San Mateo, CA.
I met with Chris Yeh the PBWorks VP of Marketing the other day, and he told me that they moved from PBWiki (which I had used many years ago) to the PBWorks name back in May of this year, and that people had created 1M workspaces since then. PBWorks gets 3M unique visitors each month, the majority of them using the free version of this service. They have about 700,000 paid seats right now, from about 5,000 paying customers, which is about a 2% (free to paid) conversion rate. This is pretty normal for a collaboration tool, in that most othercollaboration vendors I have asked about this are in the 3-4% conversion rate. To be fair PBWorks does convert 6% of its 30-day trials to paid customers which is pretty good. PBWorks is about 30 people (half of them developers), and headquartered in San Mateo, CA.
PB Works only offers a (SaaS) hosted business model, so there are some accounts, where they want the technology (server) on premise, which they have to forego. They compete with all the usual wiki suspects like: Mindtouch, SocialText, Atlassian and Jive, but have had great success in selling to teams within the enterprise or business units. Their business model is that they only charge for Network, or Full users of the workspace and not for guests, and the guest has to be added to the workspace by a networked user. In the legal market, they price a workspace by attorney, but the paralegals, etc. are free.
Their current dashboard allows you to follow people (both implicit and explicit activity), and they consider each workspace a project in which you can have tasks. I would not call this a project management or a distributed project management (DPM) tool, but rather a collaborative task management tool; something between BaseCamp and Microsoft Project. They also do iCal integration, because scheduling is really an integral part of task management.
Real Time Projects
In past blogs and reports I have talked about the easiest way to cut down project cycle time is to cut the communication (or collaboration) time between tasks. If you have to wait for (asynchronous) e-mail notifications it can be days before the person doing the task will even get to it. Whereas if there are more immediate (synchronous) communications channels (IM (can send links), Voice, or screen sharing, as well as “live editing” and “live notification)” you can often cut down project cycle time dramatically. PBWorks has nicely integrated the synchronous collaborative functions with their prior asynchronous offering, which took a lot of thought. Although it looks simple in the demo (everything looks simple in a demo), it does take a lot of work to integrate these new features in a way that does not make PBWorks more complex, as one of its big selling points is its simplicity.
IM Collaboration, Live Notifications, and Live Editing will be available to Project and Legal Edition customers on November 17. There is no charge for this free upgrade. Voice Collaboration will be available in early 2010.
There are a raft of announcements from the Enterprise 2.0 show at Moscone over the next few days, which is the first of these shows to be on the West coast. Look forward to some more blogs from the show floor or Tweets from various sessions.
Then along comes TWiki.net (now Twiki, Inc.) with efforts to monetize the work of many for the cisa exam benefit of few. A community governance group was founded and negotiations were made in good faith to allow TWiki.net to do their money quest -- so long as the name itself was handled by the community and made available to others on an equal basis. This was rejected -- then agreed to -- and then one minute before the usual weekly development meeting, rejected againccnt with all developers cut off from the twiki.org development website (by then operated, "benevolently", by TWiki.net) until they indicated acceptance
of terms giving the new corporate entity and Peter Thoeny dictatorial control (he actually demanded
to be crowned dictator for life, though with the cushy term "benevolent" in front). ccnp certification
by Chris Harris (not verified) - 02/05/2010 - 23:18
Thank you for the extended information, I quite appreciate it, one thing which I have noticed over the year is, a quality and informative post does not keep hidden, it pops up and stands out, just like this one, thannk you for posting this, it's indeed very helpful to many people.
Chris Harris Domain Services
by Steven Lamont (not verified) - 11/02/2009 - 16:25
This is a good review of a great collaboration product. I have been a paying customer of PBWorks for several years now, and am impressed by the quality of the tools.
My only concern about PBWorks is that they are miles ahead of the experience and comfort level of many users. As a project leader, I love the flexibility of organizing information, communications, and collaboration. But it is almost too much for many people I invite in, some of whom are uncomfortable organizing their own additions, and some of whom find it difficult to edit on top of other people's work.
So there is more of a human than a technical barrier to this product.
I agree with you about the human barriers. It is much easier to change a line of code in a collaboration tool, than to change someone's attitude or behavior. Many people are paralyzed by too many features or choices. So by limiting features or choices you actually make it easier for them to use. That is why I recommend to many of the collaboration tool companies I work with to make the use "easy." What I mean by easy is that it takes 1-2 clicks to do anything in the tool, and that those features are intuitive, you don't have to watch a movie or get training of any sort to be productive in the tool. That does not mean you can't have a "pro" version of the tool, where experienced users can deal with more features, functions or choices.
by Lokesh Datta (not verified) - 11/02/2009 - 16:24
David,
I wanted to let you know that Chris Yeh of PBWorks mentioned your name while conducting a panel discussion on Social Collaboration and the Consumer and the Enterprise at the SDForum Conference on Collaboration 2:0: Collaborating in the Next Decade. Paraphrasing now, he said, “David Coleman of collaborate.com said that a tool that gets in the way of collaboration is not a collaboration tool.” It was a brief 1-2 sentence mention, but I quite liked it.
Chris is quite a dynamic and impressive individual. It was a pleasure to see him action particularly when he had the (mis?)-fortune of conducting the last session of the day.
It was nice of Chris Yeh to mention me, but I (like many) are often mis-quoted. What I said was "that if the collaboration tool gets in the way of the conversation or interaction flow, then it is not a good collaborative tool." Which I still firmly believe. Getting rid of any barrier to entry for collaboration (no matter how small) is critical for good adoption. Also the person using the collaboration tool has to have an "empowering" experience their first time, or it will be hard to get them to use it a second time. Although many collaboration vendors I have talked with claim their tools are "addictive and viral" I have seen few that fit these criteria. Certainly on the consumer side Facebook and Twitter meet these criteria, but I have yet to see an enterprise tool that does. Some of my research over the summer on Social Networks in the Enterprise (report) showed at about 25% of the time, social networks arose organically, and that they spread and were adopted, often without any $ spent, but usually with the help of "champions or evangelists" within the organization.
by Nicolescandy (not verified) - 02/05/2010 - 23:22
I have no doubts whatsoever, don't know why you are asking this, I am sure it's just another way of complimenting for good work done. Furniture Storage
Comments
Then along comes TWiki.net (now Twiki, Inc.) with efforts to monetize the work of many for the
cisa exam benefit of few. A community governance group was founded and negotiations were made in good faith to allow TWiki.net to do their money quest -- so long as the name itself was handled by the community and made available to others on an equal basis. This was rejected -- then agreed to -- and then one minute before the usual weekly development meeting, rejected againccnt with all developers cut off from the twiki.org development website (by then operated, "benevolently", by TWiki.net) until they indicated acceptance
of terms giving the new corporate entity and Peter Thoeny dictatorial control (he actually demanded
to be crowned dictator for life, though with the cushy term "benevolent" in front). ccnp certification
Thank you for the extended information, I quite appreciate it, one thing which I have noticed over the year is, a quality and informative post does not keep hidden, it pops up and stands out, just like this one, thannk you for posting this, it's indeed very helpful to many people.
Chris Harris
Domain Services
This is a good review of a great collaboration product. I have been a paying customer of PBWorks for several years now, and am impressed by the quality of the tools.
My only concern about PBWorks is that they are miles ahead of the experience and comfort level of many users. As a project leader, I love the flexibility of organizing information, communications, and collaboration. But it is almost too much for many people I invite in, some of whom are uncomfortable organizing their own additions, and some of whom find it difficult to edit on top of other people's work.
So there is more of a human than a technical barrier to this product.
Steve,
I agree with you about the human barriers. It is much easier to change a line of code in a collaboration tool, than to change someone's attitude or behavior. Many people are paralyzed by too many features or choices. So by limiting features or choices you actually make it easier for them to use. That is why I recommend to many of the collaboration tool companies I work with to make the use "easy." What I mean by easy is that it takes 1-2 clicks to do anything in the tool, and that those features are intuitive, you don't have to watch a movie or get training of any sort to be productive in the tool. That does not mean you can't have a "pro" version of the tool, where experienced users can deal with more features, functions or choices.
But that is just one man's opinion.
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David,
I wanted to let you know that Chris Yeh of PBWorks mentioned your name while conducting a panel discussion on Social Collaboration and the Consumer and the Enterprise at the SDForum Conference on Collaboration 2:0: Collaborating in the Next Decade. Paraphrasing now, he said, “David Coleman of collaborate.com said that a tool that gets in the way of collaboration is not a collaboration tool.” It was a brief 1-2 sentence mention, but I quite liked it.
Chris is quite a dynamic and impressive individual. It was a pleasure to see him action particularly when he had the (mis?)-fortune of conducting the last session of the day.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments on our site.
Lokesh,
It was nice of Chris Yeh to mention me, but I (like many) are often mis-quoted. What I said was "that if the collaboration tool gets in the way of the conversation or interaction flow, then it is not a good collaborative tool." Which I still firmly believe. Getting rid of any barrier to entry for collaboration (no matter how small) is critical for good adoption. Also the person using the collaboration tool has to have an "empowering" experience their first time, or it will be hard to get them to use it a second time. Although many collaboration vendors I have talked with claim their tools are "addictive and viral" I have seen few that fit these criteria. Certainly on the consumer side Facebook and Twitter meet these criteria, but I have yet to see an enterprise tool that does. Some of my research over the summer on Social Networks in the Enterprise (report) showed at about 25% of the time, social networks arose organically, and that they spread and were adopted, often without any $ spent, but usually with the help of "champions or evangelists" within the organization.
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thanks admin
Are you really cool
I have no doubts whatsoever, don't know why you are asking this, I am sure it's just another way of complimenting for good work done.
Furniture Storage